Chapter 1 - THE SECOND VOICE
The phone continued playing after Ethan ordered Martin to stop it.
A second voice entered the recording, thin and unmistakably female.
"You promised she'd sign before George got suspicious," Marjorie said.
I watched my mother-in-law's pearls tremble against her collarbone.
Ethan reached across the table, but Martin covered the phone with one hand.
"Sit down," the attorney repeated.
"This is illegal," Ethan snapped.
"Then you can raise that objection with the investigators who already have a forensic copy," Martin answered.
The word investigators changed the air in the room.
Daniel scraped his chair backward, until its legs struck the wall.
Martin played the next stretch.
"The old man has to be out of the way before the transfer," Ethan's recorded voice said.
"Nobody's asking you to hurt him," Daniel answered, sounding frightened even through the speaker.
"I'm asking you to stop being useless," Ethan said.
My father's death had been attributed to a heart attack.
I had accepted that conclusion because grief left no room for suspicion.
Now my heart hammered so hard that I could barely hear the end of the recording.
"The medications are his problem, not ours," Marjorie said on the phone.
Martin stopped playback himself.
"That sentence is why George asked me to preserve the original," he said.
I looked directly at Ethan.
"What did you do to my father?"
For once, my husband did not have an answer prepared.
He stared at Martin instead, calculating how much evidence the attorney possessed.
"Lydia, you're upset," he finally said.
"Tell me what you did."
"Nothing," he said too quickly.
Martin slid a document across the table.
It was a photocopy of the repair shop's operating-account statement, with six withdrawals circled in red.
The amounts added up to $284,000.
Each transfer ended in an account held by a company called Northstar Property Holdings.
The authorization signatures looked like my father's.
But the final signature had been dated during a week he had been hospitalized.
"Your father believed these signatures were forged," Martin told me.
"He also believed someone had access to his medical information."
Ethan gave a humorless laugh.
"You can't expect people to believe this melodrama."
Martin opened a sealed envelope.
"George expected you to say exactly that."
Inside was a handwritten note in Dad's blocky handwriting.
Martin read it aloud.
"If Ethan denies knowing Northstar, ask him why its registered address is the mailbox he paid for behind the Oak Street pharmacy."
Daniel whispered a curse.
Marjorie gripped her folder of house photographs so tightly the leather bent.
Ethan looked at his brother, and I saw the first flash of genuine panic.
It was not the panic of an innocent man accused.
It was the panic of someone discovering a conspiracy had started collapsing from the inside.
Then Martin turned to the final page of Dad's note.
"Lydia," he said, "your father did not die believing this was only about stolen money."
He paused.
May you like
"He thought someone had begun preparing a second crime."
